It’s been difficult trying to write this op-ed. I thought to myself, “Your magnum opus about Drake has to be good enough that you won’t get embarrassed if Drake reads it. Not that Drake will read it. It won’t get to him. This is **the New School Free Press** after all, not the **Toronto Star**, Canada’s biggest daily newspaper. Drake won’t see this. But just in case he does, this has to be the best thing you’ve ever written. You can’t be embarrassed.”
But then I remembered: if there is one celebrity who would read this random college newspaper review, it would be Drake. We’re talking about the zeitgeist-meme-cornball king of hip-hop. We’re talking about the guy who, after being ridiculed for lint rolling his pants while sitting courtside at a Raptors game, released his own Drake-branded lint rollers, embracing the embarrassment. We’re talking about the guy who has appropriated emoji culture so fully that he has the praying hands tattooed on his arm. We’re talking about the guy who inspired the “Drake the type of…” tumblr, in which people pontificate on how soft the dude is. Drake is a meme. A meme who, I thought, might very well read this op-ed.
This is the kind of inner monologue that produces crippling anxiety. I love Drake so I don’t want to disappoint. I’ve loved Drake since 2008, when he released his own version of a song called “Still Fly,” originally by a rapper named Page on which he sang the chorus. “Still Fly” was Drake announcing to the smallish number of people who heard the song that he was arriving on the scene, that he was “still fly, I’m sky high.” And it had a nice melody. I was seventeen years old, and I was down with that song.
I loved Aubrey Graham before that, when he was Jimmy on “Degrassi,” and while it took me a few days to put two-and-two together—Aubrey Graham was Drake—I, unlike the of rest the world, accepted it and moved on.
Even in 2008, Drake was “responsible for everything you listen to,” as he rapped on “Still Fly.” He had three singles that year, “Best I Ever Had,” “Successful,” and “Forever,” and if you turned on Hot97 at any point during that stretch, there was a good chance you’d hear one of those songs. “Successful” and “Forever” featured some serious guest-star power. Between the two songs, you get Lil Wayne (twice), Bun B, Kanye West, and Eminem. It’s no surprise those songs got airplay. But “Best I Ever Had” was Drake’s first real solo hit, a love song by all accounts. It samples a song called “Falling in Love” by Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds, and it’s where Drake first debuts his signature style of emotional rap-singing. And the video is dope.
Now, in 2015, Drake is even more responsible for everything we’re listening to. And the sentiment is even more valid after he dropped his album/mixtape If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late on February 13, 2015, an early Valentine’s day gift to all.
He didn’t promote it. No one knew this was coming. The day before, he released a short film, “Jungle,” on Vimeo, in which nothing really happens and we get about one minute of the song of the same name. This film is about fame and the problems it can bring. Drake, starring sadly out the window of his car, says that “Shit’s just crazy man, the whole energy out here is just changing, you know. It’s just getting dark, man, quick.” It’s understood that he’s “having a hard time adjusting to fame,” as he rapped on “Marvin’s Room” in 2011.
The next day, the album arrived on iTunes, billed as a mixtape you’d have to actually pay for. It was not hosted on any of the normal hip hop mixtape blogs, like datpiff or livemixtapes. If you wanted it for free (or, sort of free, depending on how you look at it), you could listen to it on Spotify. Drake pulled a reverse Taylor Swift, and it worked, selling 495,000 copies in its first week.
“If I die, all I know is I’m a mothafuckin’ legend,” Drake raps on the first track, aptly titled “Legend.” And while everyone is, of course, entitled to their own opinions, this statement has reached the level of being “measurably true.” As of March 7, 2015, Drake owned 42% of Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip Hop Songs Chart. That’s each of the seventeen songs on his surprise album/mixtape plus four other songs.
The album has a strange quality to it. It seems almost as if Drake released it just to satisfy his record contract–how else to explain selling it on iTunes yet calling it a mixtape? (Mixtapes are, historically, free). But this is a strange time for hip hop, and, particularly, Drake and his Young Money Cash Money Billionaire friends, one of the first families of hip hop over the past few years, responsible for nine number one albums since 2008.
The friends, it seems, are no longer quite that. Wayne is suing Birdman, co-founder of Cash Money Records, for $51 million for delaying his new album, “Tha Carter V.” Drake stands with Wayne, and he says so on If You’re Reading This, rapping “Walk up in my label like, where the check though?/Yeah, I said it, wouldn’t dap you with the left, ho.” Drake no longer fucks with his record label.
It makes me sad, the dissolution of Young Money Cash Money. I don’t know what to do with my YMCMB sweatshirt now. But I do know that Drake isn’t lying when he calls himself a legend. “Please don’t speak to me like I’m that Drake from four years ago, I’m at a higher place,” he raps on “No Tellin’.” We won’t, Drake. Because you are at a higher place. You’re a legend.